Data Science for Social Good: Philanthropy and Social Impact in a Complex World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Ciro Cattuto and Massimo Lapucci: “This book is a collection of insights by thought leaders at first-mover organizations in the emerging field of “Data Science for Social Good”. It examines the application of knowledge from computer science, complex systems, and computational social science to challenges such as humanitarian response, public health, and sustainable development. The book provides an overview of scientific approaches to social impact – identifying a social need, targeting an intervention, measuring impact – and the complementary perspective of funders and philanthropies pushing forward this new sector.

TABLE OF CONTENTS


Introduction; By Massimo Lapucci

The Value of Data and Data Collaboratives for Good: A Roadmap for Philanthropies to Facilitate Systems Change Through Data; By Stefaan G. Verhulst

UN Global Pulse: A UN Innovation Initiative with a Multiplier Effect; By Dr. Paula Hidalgo-Sanchis

Building the Field of Data for Good; By Claudia Juech

When Philanthropy Meets Data Science: A Framework for Governance to Achieve Data-Driven Decision-Making for Public Good; By Nuria Oliver

Data for Good: Unlocking Privately-Held Data to the Benefit of the Many; By Alberto Alemanno

Building a Funding Data Ecosystem: Grantmaking in the UK; By Rachel Rank

A Reflection on the Role of Data for Health: COVID-19 and Beyond; By Stefan E. Germann and Ursula Jasper….(More)”

Launch of UN Biodiversity Lab 2.0: Spatial data and the future of our planet

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Press Release: “…The UNBL 2.0 is a free, open-source platform that enables governments and others to access state-of-the-art maps and data on nature, climate change, and human development in new ways to generate insight for nature and sustainable development. It is freely available online to governments and other stakeholders as a digital public good…

The UNBL 2.0 release responds to a known global gap in the types of spatial data and tools, providing an invaluable resource to nations around the world to take transformative action. Users can now access over 400 of the world’s best available global spatial data layers; create secure workspaces to incorporate national data alongside global data; use curated data collections to generate insight for action; and more. Without specialized tools or training, decision-makers can leverage the power of spatial data to support priority-setting and the implementation of nature-based solutions. Dynamic metrics and indicators on the state of our planet are also available….(More)”.

Data Stewardship Re-Imagined — Capacities and Competencies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog and presentation by Stefaan Verhulst: “In ways both large and small, COVID-OVID-19 has forced us to re-examine every aspect of our political, social, and economic systems. Among the many lessons, policymakers have learned is that existing methods for using data are often insufficient for our most pressing challenges. In particular, we need to find new, innovative ways of tapping into the potential of privately held and siloed datasets that nonetheless contain tremendous public good potential, including complementing and extending official statistics. Data collaboratives are an emerging set of methods for accessing and reusing data that offer tremendous opportunities in this regard. In the last five years, we have studied and initiated numerous data collaboratives, in the process assembling a collection of over 200 example case studies to better understand their possibilities.

Among our key findings is the vital importance and essential role that needs to be played by Data Stewards.

Data stewards do not represent an entirely new profession; rather, their role could be understood as an extension and re-definition of existing organizational positions that manage and interact with data. Traditionally, the role of a data officer was limited either to data integrity or the narrow context of internal data governance and management, with a strong emphasis on technical competencies. This narrow conception is no longer sufficient, especially given the proliferation of data and the increasing potential of data sharing and collaboration. As such, we call for a re-imagination of data stewardship to encompass a wider range of functions and responsibilities, directed at leveraging data assets toward addressing societal challenges and improving people’s lives.

DATA STEWARDSHIP: functions and competencies to enable access to and re-use of data for public benefit in a systematic, sustainable, and responsible way.

In our vision, data stewards are professionals empowered to create public value (including official statistics) by re-using data and data expertise, identifying opportunities for productive cross-sectoral collaboration, and proactively requesting or enabling functional access to data, insights, and expertise. Data stewards are active in both the public and private sectors, promoting trust within and outside their organizations. They are essential to data collaboratives by providing functional access to unlock the potential of siloed data sets. In short, data stewards form a new — and essential — link in the data value chain….(More)”.

Data governance: Enhancing access to and sharing of data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Recommendation: “Access to and sharing of data are increasingly critical for fostering data-driven scientific discovery and innovations across the private and public sectors globally and will play a role in solving societal challenges, including fighting COVID-19 and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But restrictions to data access, sometimes compounded by a reluctance to share, and a growing awareness of the risks that come with data access and sharing, means economies and societies are not harnessing the full potential of data.


Adopted in October 2021, the OECD Recommendation on Enhancing Access to and Sharing of Data (EASD) is the first internationally agreed upon set of principles and policy guidance on how governments can maximise the cross-sectoral benefits of all types of data – personal, non-personal, open, proprietary, public and private – while protecting the rights of individuals and organisations.


The Recommendation intends to help governments develop coherent data governance policies and frameworks to unlock the potential benefits of data across and within sectors, countries, organisations, and communities. It aims to reinforce trust across the data ecosystem, stimulate investment in data and incentivise data access and sharing, and foster effective and responsible data access, sharing, and use across sectors and jurisdictions.


The Recommendation is a key deliverable of phase 3 of the OECD’s Going Digital project, focused on data governance for frowth and well-being. It was developed by three OECD Committees (Digital Economy Policy, Scientific and Technological Policy, and Public Governance) and acts as a common reference for existing and new OECD legal instruments related to data in areas such as research, health and digital government. It will provide a foundation stone for ongoing OECD work to help countries unlock the potential of data in the digital era….(More)”.

Mobile Big Data in the fight against COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Editorial to Special Collection of Data&Policy by Richard Benjamins, Jeanine Vos, and Stefaan Verhulst: “Almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, parts of the world feel like they may slowly be getting back to (a new) normal. Nevertheless, we know that the damage is still unfolding, and that much of the developing world Southeast Asia and Africa in particular — remain in a state of crisis. Given the global nature of this disease and the potential for mutant versions to develop and spread, a crisis anywhere is cause for concern everywhere. The world remains very much in the grip of this public health crisis.

From the beginning, there has been hope that data and technology could offer solutions to help inform governments’ response strategy and decision-making. Many of the expectations have been focused on mobile data analytics, and in particular the possibility of mobile network operators creating mobility insights and decision-making tools generated from anonymized and aggregated telco data. This hoped-for capability results from a growing group of mobile network operators investing in systems and capabilities to develop such decision-support products and services for public and private sector customers. The value of having such tools has been demonstrated in addressing different global challenges, ranging from the possibilities offered by models to better understand the spread of Zika in Brazil to interactive dashboards that aided emergency services during earthquakes and floods in Japan. Yet despite these experiences, many governments across the world still have limited awareness, capabilities, budgets and resources to leverage such tools in their efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 using non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI).

This special collection of papers we launched in Data & Policy examines both the potential of mobile data, as well as the challenges faced in delivering these tools to inform government decision-making. To date, the collection

Consisting of 11 papers from 71 researchers and experts from academia, industry, and government, the articles cover a wide range of geographies, including Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Ecuador, Estonia, Europe (as a whole), France, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Italy, Malawi, Nigeria, Nordics, and Spain. Responding to our call for case studies to illustrate the opportunities (and challenges) offered by mobile big data in the fight against COVID-19, the authors of these papers describe a number of examples of how mobile and mobile-related data have been used to address the medical, economic, socio-cultural and political aspects of the pandemic….(More)”.

Using location data responsibly in cities and local government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ben Hawes: “City and local governments increasingly recognise the power of location data to help them deliver more and better services, exactly where and when they are needed. The use of this data is going to grow, with more pressure to manage resources and emerging challenges including responding to extreme weather events and other climate impacts.

But using location data to target and manage local services comes with risks to the equitable delivery of services, privacy and accountability. To make the best use of these growing data resources, city leaders and their teams need to understand those risks and address them, and to be able to explain their uses of data to citizens.

The Locus Charter, launched earlier this year, is a set of common principles to promote responsible practice when using location data. The Charter could be very valuable to local governments, to help them navigate the challenges and realise the rewards offered by data about the places they manage….

Compared to private companies, local public bodies already have special responsibilities to ensure transparency and fairness. New sources of data can help, but can also generate new questions. Local governments have generally been able to improve services as they learned more about the people they served. Now they must manage the risks of knowing too much about people, and acting intrusively. They can also risk distorting service provision because their data about people in places is uneven or unrepresentative.

Many city and local governments fully recognise that data-driven delivery comes with risks, and are developing specific local data ethics frameworks to guide their work. Some of these, like Kansas City’s, are specifically aimed at managing data privacy. Others cover broader uses of data, like Greater Manchester’s Declaration for Intelligent and Responsible Data Practice (DTPR). DTPR is an open source communication standard that helps people understand how data is being used in public places.

London is engaging citizens on an Emerging Technology Charter, to explore new and ethically charged questions around data. Govlab supports an AI Localism repository of actions taken by local decision-makers to address the use of AI within a city or community. The EU Sherpa programme (Shaping the Ethical Dimensions of Smart Information Systems) includes a smart cities strand, and has published a case-study on the Ethics of Using Smart City AI and Big Data.

Smart city applications make it potentially possible to collect data in many ways, for many purposes, but the technologies cannot answer questions about what is appropriate. In The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future (2019), author Ben Green describes examples when some cities have failed and others succeeded in judging what smart applications should be used.

Attention to what constitutes ethical practice with location data can give additional help to leaders making that kind of judgement….(More)”

Licensure as Data Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Frank Pasquale: “…A licensure regime for data and the AI it powers would enable citizens to democratically shape data’s scope and proper use, rather than resigning ourselves to being increasingly influenced and shaped by forces beyond our control.To ground the case for more ex ante regulation, Part I describes the expanding scope of data collection, analysis, and use, and the threats that that scope poses to data subjects. Part II critiques consent-based models of data protection, while Part III examines the substantive foundation of licensure models. Part IV addresses a key challenge to my approach: the free expression concerns raised by the licensure of large-scale personal data collection, analysis, and use. Part V concludes with reflections on the opportunities created by data licensure frameworks and potential limitations upon them….(More)”.

Big data for big issues: Revealing travel patterns of low-income population based on smart card data mining in a global south unequal city

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Caio Pieroni, Mariana Giannotti, Bianca B.Alves, and Renato Arbex: “Smart card data (SCD) allow analyzing mobility at a fine level of detail, despite the remaining challenges such as identifying trip purpose. The use of the SCD may improve the understanding of transit users’ travel patterns from precarious settlements areas, where the residents have historically limited access to opportunities and are usually underrepresented in surveys. In this paper, we explore smart card data mining to analyze the temporal and spatial patterns of the urban transit movements from residents of precarious settlements areas in São Paulo, Brazil, and compare the similarities and differences in travel behavior with middle/high-income-class residents. One of our concerns is to identify low-paid employment travel patterns from the low-income-class residents, that are also underrepresented in transportation planning modeling due to the lack of data. We employ the k-means clustering algorithm for the analysis, and the DBSCAN algorithm is used to infer passengers’ residence locations. The results reveal that most of the low-income residents of precarious settlements begin their first trip before, between 5 and 7 AM, while the better-off group begins from 7 to 9 AM. At least two clusters formed by commuters from precarious settlement areas suggest an association of these residents with low-paid employment, with their activities placed in medium / high-income residential areas. So, the empirical evidence revealed in this paper highlights smart card data potential to unfold low-paid employment spatial and temporal patterns….(More)”.

Statistics and Data Science for Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Issue of Chance by Caitlin Augustin, Matt Brems, and Davina P. Durgana: “One lesson that our team has taken from the past 18 months is that no individual, no team, and no organization can be successful on their own. We’ve been grateful and humbled to witness incredible collaboration—taking on forms of resource sharing, knowledge exchange, and reimagined outcomes. Some advances, like breakthrough medicine, have been widely publicized. Other advances have received less fanfare. All of these advances are in the public interest and demonstrate how collaborations can be done “for good.”

In reading this issue, we hope that you realize the power of diverse multidisciplinary collaboration; you recognize the positive social impact that statisticians, data scientists, and technologists can have; and you learn that this isn’t limited to companies with billions of dollars or teams of dozens of people. You, our reader, can get involved in similar positive social change.

This special edition of CHANCE focuses on using data and statistics for the public good and on highlighting collaborations and innovations that have been sparked by partnerships between pro bono institutions and social impact partners. We recognize that the “pro bono” or “for good” field is vast, and we welcome all actors working in the public interest into the big tent.

Through the focus of this edition, we hope to demonstrate how new or novel collaborations might spark meaningful and lasting positive change in communities, sectors, and industries. Anchored by work led through Statistics Without Borders and DataKind, this edition features reporting on projects that touch on many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Pro bono volunteerism is one way of democratizing access to high-skill, high-expense services that are often unattainable for social impact organizations. Statistics Without Borders (founded in 2008), DataKind (founded in 2012), and numerous other volunteer organizations began with this model in mind: If there was an organizing or galvanizing body that could coordinate the myriad requests for statistical, data science, machine learning, or data engineering help, there would be a ready supply of talented individuals who would want to volunteer to see those projects through. Or, put another way, “If you build it, they will come.”

Doing pro bono work requires more than positive intent. Plenty of well-meaning organizations and individuals charitably donate their time, their energy, their expertise, only to have an unintended adverse impact. To do work for good, ethics is an important part of the projects. In this issue, you’ll notice the writers’ attention to independent review boards (IRBs), respecting client and data privacy, discussing ethical considerations of methods used, and so on.

While no single publication can fully capture the great work of pro bono organizations working in “data for good,” we hope readers will be inspired to contribute to open source projects, solve problems in a new way, or even volunteer themselves for a future cohort of projects. We’re thrilled that this special edition represents programs, partners, and volunteers from around the world. You will learn about work that is truly representative of the SDGs, such as international health organizations’ work in Uganda, political justice organizations in Kenya, and conservationists in Madagascar, to name a few.

Several articles describe projects that are contextualized with the SDGs. While achieving many goals is interconnected, such as the intertwining of economic attainment and reducing poverty, we hope that calling out key themes here will whet your appetite for exploration.

  • • Multiple articles focused on tackling aspects of SDG 3: Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for people at all ages.
  • • An article tackling SDG 8: Promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth; full and productive employment; and decent work for all.
  • • Several articles touching on SDG 9: Build resilient infrastructure; promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation; one is a reflection on building and sustaining free and open source software as a public good.
  • • A handful of articles highlighting the needs for capacity-building and systems-strengthening aligned to SDG 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development; provide access to justice for all; and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels.
  • • An article about migration along the southern borders of the United States addressing multiple issues related to poverty (SDG 1), opportunity (SDG 10), and peace and justice (SDG 16)….(More)”

Putting data at the heart of policymaking will accelerate London’s recovery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mel Hobson at Computer Weekly: “…London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, knows how important this is. His re-election manifesto committed to rebuilding the London Datastore, currently home to over 700 freely available datasets, as the central register linking data across our city. That in turn will help analysts, researchers and policymakers understand our city and develop new ideas and solutions.

To help take the next step and create a data ecosystem that can improve millions of Londoners lives, businesses across our capital are committing their expertise and insights.

At London First, we have launched the London Data Charter, expertly put together by Pinsent Masons, and setting out the guiding principles for private and public sector data collaborations, which are key to creating this ecosystem. These include a focus on protecting privacy and security of data, promoting trust and sharing learnings with others – creating scalable solutions to meet the capital’s challenges….(More)”.